Does BIRT (2.6.1) produce PDF files, which conform the PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b standards? Simply these standards are for the digital preservation of the documents. For example the fonts should be embedded in the PDF etc. I checked my code and I have not used PDFRenderOption.setEmbededFont(true). What default value BIRT uses with the font embedding?

Is it really so that I have to change the source code? Is it possible that in the future releases of the BIRT API there would be a possibility to set above conformance (PdfWriter.PDFA1B, PdfWriter.PDF_VERSION_1_4 etc.) directly?

Open a bugzilla entry to see if we can get an option put in the pdf
emitter for this.

Jason

On 10/27/2011 1:56 AM, mika.tapanainen wrote:
> Is it really so that I have to change the source code? Is it possible
> that in the future releases of the BIRT API there would be a possibility
> to set above conformance (PdfWriter.PDFA1B, PdfWriter.PDF_VERSION_1_4
> etc.) directly?

It is not in the development plan yet. Hopefully we will have an update
shortly.

Jason

On 12/15/2011 5:33 AM, NJ wrote:
> Is there any news on this topic? i.e. Is it planned to implement this
> feature in the near future? We also have a need to archive data that is
> exported using BIRT. The format has to be PDF/A-1b
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.

We are publishing the 4.3 plan this week, but this bug is not in the list. Is patching the PDF an emitter an option?

Jason, thanks for your reply. How would that work with patching the PDF by an emmiter?

Just to explain what I need to achieve more in detail. PDF files I am currently creating are generated on server from an external system that uses a birt-runtime with standard report design files created in BIRT 2.5.2 (upgrading to the latest version of BIRT is not a problem if needed). Report design file exports the xml data source to pdf format. The whole process is managed with a script written in bash. If there's any tool that would be able to convert the standard PDF file generated with BIRT to the PDF/A format, that would be the sufficient solution for my needs.

There a couple of ways I can think to do this. First modify the source for the existing BIRT PDF emitter to put code in to add:
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document,
new FileOutputStream(filename));
writer.setPdfVersion(PdfWriter.PDF_VERSION_1_4);
writer.setPDFXConformance(PdfWriter.PDFA1B)

You would then export the new emitter plugin and replace your current one with the one you modified. Another option may be to write a program that uses iText to open the PDF documents and add the above code. I have not tried either approach, so I am not 100% that this will work though.

I'm trying to figure out what would be the best solution for our project to edit PDF/A compliant documents. Have you come to a satisfying solution with BIRT/iText or with other tools? Thanks for giving clues if any!

Hi Guillaume,
I haven't tried any of the procedures yet, that Jason suggested earlier. I'm waiting for the upcomming release of BIRT 4.3 now (should be out in just few days) and I'll see if any possible functions for generating reports in format PDF/A are included.

Has someone else by any chance found another possible solution that would solve this problem?